News and activities at Norma Marion Alloway Library, Trinity Western University

June 02, 2016

App connects you to London's cultural heritage.

If you are travelling to London, England this year (or next year as part of the TWU travel study tour, and have a literary bend, you may want to download a new app called Poetic Places.

Poetic Places brings poetic depictions of places into the everyday world, helping you to encounter poems and literature in the locations they actually describe, accompanied by audiovisual materials drawn from archive collections.

The app is currently in its infancy and only features content for London but the developers hope to expand it to encompass places all over the world.

Utilising geolocation services and push notifications, Poetic Places can let you know when you stumble across a place depicted in verse. Alternatively, you can browse the poems and places as a source of inspiration without travelling.

Poetic Places aspires to give a renewed sense of place, to bring together writings and paintings and sounds to mean more than they do alone, and to bring literature into your everyday life in unexpected moments.

This app is the outcome of a collaborative project between the British Library and TIME/IMAGE, funded by CreativeWorks London. Visit the Poetic Places website to find out more about the project. (Read more)

All the material and content in the app, which currently only works in London, was sourced from open archives, collections, museum websites and their Flickr accounts, anything that could be used freely under Creative Commons licenses. Choices of places to include were also swayed by items that were out of copyright, due to both the practicality and expense of clearing them, but also to highlight the vast amount of information in the public domain that can be used creatively. (Read more)